Bring up the topic of seeds and Nabita Goud sits up a little straighter and begins to talk animatedly.

Nabita is a smallholder and a “seed guardian” at the Maa Lankeshwari seedbank of Bhimdanga village in Odisha, eastern India. The seedbank is a small room lined with rows of neatly-labelled earthen pots and stoppered glass bottles, all of them filled with varieties of millets, ladies finger (okra), pumpkin, and red gram seeds (lentil), along with cotton.

Nabita puts her hand into a pot and scoops out a fistful of paddy seeds which are a dull brown, the colour of the soil. “This is kalajira rice,” said Nabita, who is an organic and Fairtrade-certified farmer. “It’s a scented, local variety and gives us a high-yield. We are now conserving it.”

Forget GM Seeds, Go Organic, And India Will Have A Better Chance At Weathering Climate Change

Bijal Vachharajani

02 Dec 2015

Last month, while the Indian social media was going berserk over the many Khans of Bollywood, a World Bank report about climate change and poverty was published. It contained warnings about a horrible future that is right around the corner, but few paid attention to the concerns outlined in Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty.

According to Shock Waves, by 2030, over 100 million people would have been forced into extreme poverty because of climate change. That’s just 15 years away.

Adilabad is on the northern tip Of Telangana Stat not affected by the deficit monsoon is likely to emerge as a top cotton trading unit in 2015-2016 given the expectations of a bumper yield, but which has left an adverse impact on almost every cotton growing area in the country.

Addi Ramchander Reddy, a cotton commission agent and market observer in Adilabad said that purchase in the private sector will be far less in quantum as there are no big players left in the market now.

The yield of cotton this year is anticipated to be in the range of 8 quintals to 10 quintals per acre. The area under the crop being over 3.17 lakh hectares, the total produce would be in the vicinity of 70 lakh quintals.

How deficit rains fill the life of farmers with uncertainty

It was nearly impossible to drive through Raichur district of north Karnataka without being lulled into a trance by the unbroken red soil. A warm wind blew hard and free across the arid landscape, and dust rose above the fields. The fields looked just cleared, or recently sown with seeds. The few saplings that were visible looked young, only ankle high. What seemed like the beginning of the kharif season, however, was its withering end; a dry, uneventful harvest.

HYDERABAD: Heavy rains in the last two days in several parts of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh has wiped out the drought to a considerable extent, bringing cheers to farmers and life to a number of streams and rivulets.

The rainfall deficit in Telangana on Thursday came down to minus 18 per cent from minus 23 a couple of days ago. In AP, the deficit has been reduced to minus 8 from minus 14 per cent. Many places recorded rainfall of over 100 mm. While farmers in many districts intensified agricultural activity to meet the Khariff target, the rains have also stabilised the standing crops - which otherwise faced termination.

NEW DELHI: Competing forecasts have injected a new dimension to the hazardous business of monsoon prediction this year, with private weather agency Skymet taking a completely different view of how rains would perform in what are the most crucial four months of the year for India's economy.

NAGPUR: In a bizarre development, seven debt-ridden farmers, among them three women, in Maharashtra's Wardha district have sought the administration's "permission" to commit suicide.

"The situation has become so bad that these seven peasants have approached the district officials requesting their green signal to end their lives," said Kishore Tiwari, president of the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, an NGO working for farmers' rights.

Kishore Ingale, Bhanudas Wadadkar, Pankaj Gawande, Shankar Khadse, and the women farmers - Kundabai Lonkar, Kamala Warhade and Vasanta Gingavkar - from Wadad village, have been running from pillar to post since January for the aid promised by the Maharashtra government, he said.